Category Archives: Route 66

The garage is fast turning into a music studio, and my workshop being overtaken by amps, guitars and copies of song chords floating around the place.

Yep, that’s me aged about 7

I’d already had the idea for some mood lighting in my workshop/mancave before the studio came about. Over the last 12 months I’ve purchased some original parts from a 1960 FB Holden on ebay – tail lights and the instrument cluster. They’re heavy and metallic, with real screws and light bulb sockets, and with real 50 year old dust as well. We had one of them when I was a kid in the late 1960s – it was light green with a dark green highlight.

To bring these to life, I’ve basically shoved a 100 LED Christmas light string into the back of each of them. There was a fair bit of order put into that “shove” action, just to be clear.

The tail lights are fantastic, the dash not as bright as I would have liked, but it still looks good and the whole set up is great fun.

It’s years since I’ve done a road trip, but I’m just back from one and I can’t wait to do another. I forgotten that sense of freedom you get from being on the road, free from the worries of the day to day grind.

The open road.

The steady hum of an engine converting the energy from a distance long ago sun into forward motion.

Insects going splat on the windscreen

Changing landscapes

Bad food

Good music through bad speakers.

Uncomfortable beds.

There are some memorable road trips lurking in my past. I’ve been thinking about them since I returned home on the weekend:

Driving up and down the NSW coast with a few mates, a car and a van full of PA equipment. We did four gigs over four hot summer nights. We were sleeping under canvas and I was bitten on the eyelid in the middle of the last night by a monster ant. I have never been so physically tired – I think I could have slept for 24 hours. Instead, I drove 10 hours home.

Driving the long way round to Adelaide from Sydney – via Melbourne – with a mate. We camped and explored, and loaded the car onto the train in Port Augusta and did the rest of the trip to Perth in economy coach class on the train.

The great “NSW National Park Crawl” I did with my wife – exploring most of the national parks in northern NSW, camping and bushwalking our way around the magnificent sub-tropical rainforests.

One new aspect of being on the road is coping with being off-line. On my most recent trip, we only had mobile phone reception in major towns, and these were often hundreds of kilometres apart. When I’m next on the road in a less remote situation, I’ll think carefully about rationing on-line time.

Like my writing, I’m more of a plotter than a pantser when it comes to planning head – knowing where I’m going and when in advance makes the trip more enjoyable, but that’s a matter of personal preference.

There is a plan to drive Route 66 in 2016, and that seems a few steps closer now that I’ve spent two weeks with the open road stretching out in front of the car.

Gallery

Thanks to the generosity of a group of friends, I recently spent a couple of days in the company of Rocky, a 1967 convertible Mustang, to celebrate my birthday. I’ve never been a huge Mustang fan myself. My Americana fetish … Continue reading →